If you’ve ever wondered what your environment looked like in the past, or just like looking at old photographs of places you know, then Historypin is well worth a download.
Searching for pictures couldn't be more easy. The app shows them pinned to Google Maps so you just pan around to any places of interest. Tap on the pic icon …

COMMENTS

OMG!

App2sd

A bit unrelated to the app HistoryPin (although it's a fine app), but it's good to see El Reg Android reviews saying whether or not the app supports "app2sd".

It baffles me why devs still release apps that DON'T support it*, considering it is a mere one-line change in the application's manifest XML file.

As for HistoryPin, it's a fascinating app. The only issues I've found with it so far is that on the OH's Asus Transformer it inexplicibly rotates to Portrait when you're holding the tablet in Landscape (and vice versa), and you can't seem to view the "modern" views of each photo in the app.

(* apart from the obvious launchers and widgets thanks to Android limitations)

App2sd - why

App development manager here. We didn't originally have app2sd because it wasn't introduced until 2.2. We had to disable use support for 2.1 and below to get this working.

Regarding the Transformer issue, we're releasing a fix for this any moment now. It's a matter of the X Y and Z axis being different on Honeycomb tablets. We can only really test on our Galaxy Tab 10.1 so any feedback on how it works in other tablets would be welcome!

Um

"We didn't originally have app2sd because it wasn't introduced until 2.2. We had to disable use support for 2.1 and below to get this working."

I may be wrong, but that's not true as far as I know. You can use the 2.2 and above SDK to generate an APK targeted at 2.1 and above if you want, which would allow app2sd on 2.2+ devices but retain compatibility with 2.1 devices.

Thanks for the heads-up about the rotation issue fix and the link. Looks like a nightmare to implement! Will be happy to more thoroughly test the app on my OH's Transformer (I've mainly used it on my own Nexus One).

Yes

You can supply a 2.2 manifest and set the min supported api to 2.1. Use 2.2 tags and they get ignored by the old version. So yes you can support moving apps to sd.

Google have also changed marketplace so even if this were not possible that now you can upload multiple apks under the same product name and it gets matched up to the right device by magic.

The move app to sd doesn't strictly do that though. It moves resources to sd (within an encrypted loopback device), but keeps the app code on the protected flash. If your app were really large, it would still consume a lot of space. The solution to that is probably to write a custom dex loader, shifting out some classes into an external dex which is treated like a resource but it could be a lot of effort.

Apparently available on iPhone from end of the month...

Tom Pellereau's idea?

Isn't this a more refined version Tom Pellereau's (The Apprentice) idea that he had brain stormed during the mobile application task? Then again i haven't bothered to check if History Pin pre-dates The Apprentice recording. Lawsuit anybody?

Doesn't show up in Android Market for me

Not on market for me either...

Tried searching for it on the market and it didn't show. Folllowed the link to the market from the article, it's there and it is compatible with my phone! Clicked install and the install process kicked off immediately, installed no problems and a quick try of it shows it appears to work.